A Change In The Formula – Hell Girl Midseason

August 19, 2017

Sorry for the delay in today’s post but PUBG was just a super distraction and I had a huge headache throughout the day. The cure to what ailed me was some good catching up on some entertaining things, including the hilarious AHO-Girl and the considerably less hilarious Hell Girl. This has been slated as a quicker season per MyAnimeList and they have done a good job of breaking the pattern of 20 episodes of “Scooby-Doo” style rinse and repeat episodes with little direct plot development and 3 episodes of legit story, to a few good teasing shots and a great reveal mid season. This article should be pretty quick as I probably don’t need to harp on about how great the voice acting is contrasted to how awful the art can be.

Episode 4 started out with something that hit hard to me, which is elderly abuse in nursing homes. For those of you that do not know, the three most at risk for healthcare worker abuse is the very young, (infants) the very old (retirees), or the mentally impaired, which can be combined with either of the aforementioned to make a very vulnerable individual. Ethics and compliance polices are mandated by the government to deter this sort of thing but most people can sweep this under the rug as the victims can either be coerced into not reporting, be decried as “insane” or “not knowing what they’re talking about” or not even know whats going on to report. As such we find a very easy to hate target in the direct of a nursing home who makes a killing out of charging retirees and their families copious amounts of money to take little care of them. When things start going down we find Tsugumi from the previous seasons grown up and working trying to deter Ai’s group from banishing more people to hell. The elderly woman who banishes the director to hell ends up suffering severe dementia in the end and not even remembering she banished the director to hell. I know what I said in the beginning of this but I will say however, that the art in this episode was surprisingly better than the past 3.

Episode 5 however, is where the plot thickens and develops, with some creepy kid getting counter creepy kid’d. Specifically the young boy Yamawaro ends up creeping on the girl we’ve been seeing in green this whole season, Michiro. The scenario we are given is a child who appears to have survivor’s guilt and his parents who were driving a car when the other 3 children in the car died from a car accident. Of course we find out that this children who died were outright cunts, and fully should have died. Now you may be saying “Rokutsu, that’s absolutely uncalled for and excessive.” To which my first reply is, “Fuck you” second being that I’m not talking about their personalities, which are cunty enough, but the fact that they literally mocked the kid and his parents about wearing seat belts, and threw a can up front which jammed the brakes. Plus the children decided to have a go of sitting outside the car as if they were shooting in a game of PUBG. The survivor and his family are hated by the parents of the victims and the boy is targeted to be killed. In the end, the mother that was going to banish him to hell is thankfully brought to her senses by the rationality she clearly didn’t impart to her kid, and discards the curse doll.

Wear your fucking seat belts.

Turns out that Michiru was in a similar scenario circa early 20th century Japan, with the landlord of her tenement housing block and their shithead son being well, shitheads. The boy and his two goons proceed to take Michiru to a pond to try to drown her. This fails with goon 1 and 2 drowning shithead son with Michiru being blamed mirroring the instance above. However, we do not get a realization of logic, but people in the village kidnapping and imprisoning Michiru for 10 days in a shed. Her parents finally find her (alive miraculously) and the father is subsequently beaten to death as the shed is locked and set ablaze. Tragic right? Well not so much since Michiru, while burning alive under her mother, decides to give being the Human Torch a try. Beyond killing those who murdered her family, she sets the entire village on fire, resulting in a grievous sin she must atone for. Sound familiar? Yup, Michiru too now has a lovely career as Hell Girl in a new franchise, assisted by Yamawaro as they proceed to take their first soul to hell, who is an asshole who beat a man into a coma as a drunken piece of shit. The ending and everything is a bit tragic and I leave you to watch it as well. So let me know what you thought of this season and leave a comment and remember only you, can stop village fires.

I guess if you are a big fan of the show and really like the formula it would feel like they are just messing with it. I’m only kind of fond of the show, and to be honest, the change has been quite pleasant for something a bit different.